Whenever you spend some amount of time thinking about the future, confronting various trends together, trying to understand how they might interact with one another and trigger other changes, there are a few realizations you seem to always come back to. And the key importance of education is one of them.

Let’s be clear about one thing. I’m perfectly aware that it seems very pretentious because it sounds like I know the future. And that’s a superpower that everyone would love to have. And yet I still pretend it because it often triggers a conversation that I like to have. It makes people curious, and that’s always a first step to an interesting chat.

I’m always amazed when I listen to the TV news and they say things like “The weather is nice, the music is good… Which is awesome for the turnover of restaurants and hotels”. We almost don’t mention the fact that people are enjoying their time in summer festivals and so on. We mostly care about work and the economy. How cynical have we become that we find this kind of comment completely normal? That the money any experience generates has become more important than the experience itself. In my view, this is the result of decades of propaganda that have made us accept the fact that we need money to live, the only way to make money is with a job, so anything that creates or sustains those jobs is awesome, regardless of how enjoyable or useful those jobs are.

It’s become a running gag with my friends now: I don’t drink alcohol so when someone asks me if I want something to drink, my answer is always « an iced tea ». So whenever my friends see me in front of a half-empty bottle of iced tea, ranting about self-driving cars and how they are gonna change the world, they say « and here we go, he’s at it again! ». And guess what I just drank…

If you are navigating the tech world these days, chances are you’ve heard the term « blockchain » once or twice. Hell even if you are not interested in tech, you may have heard the phrase more than that: the buzz is raging. But what lies behind the buzz exactly? What is this blockchain everyone is so excited about?

First of all, let’s make something clear. Yes, the blockchain was originally created to support another buzz-inducing technology: the Bitcoin. You may have heard of Bitcoin as a virtual currency used by drug and weapons dealers on the dark corners of the internet. Well, it is much more than that, but that’s a story for another day. Because like a lot of interesting innovations, what’s even more interesting than the bitcoin is the technology that was invented to make it possible, and that is the blockchain.

I remember when I was a teenager in 1995, and people around me kept saying things like “This computer thingy? Nah! Not for me… I don’t get it.” And I remember thinking: “How can they not see? How can’t they see that this computer thingy is going to be an integral part of everyone’s future?”

It seemed so obvious to me back then that there would be people able to understand and talk to the machines, and those ruled by them. And that’s one of the main reasons why I got into computers and software in the first place: I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines, I wanted to understand how they worked, I wanted to be able to speak their language, I even wanted to participate in shaping how they would work.